About Synergies

Synergies : Canada's SSH Research Infrastructure - A not-for-profit platform for the publication and the dissemination of research results in social sciences and humanities published in Canada.

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129319

journal articles

54158

theses

1647

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Synergies, a Founding Project for the Canadian Research Results Dissemination

By offering the first national dissemination platform of SSH Canadian research results, Synergies has provided the Canadian scholarly publishing sector with the first virtual showcase for a large corpus of research publications.Although the project ended in 2012, the benefits of Synergies are still highly visible throughout the Canadian research dissemination landscape.

Synergies success keys factors

The success of the Synergies project was made possible by the contributions of the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) and provincial governments as part of the 2006 National Platforms Fund (NPF). Under the direction of University of Montreal, the project governance was assumed in collaboration with the University of New Brunswick, the University of Toronto, the University of Calgary and the Simon Fraser University.

Synergies technological infrastructure is based on the resources and the expertise of two Canadian leading organizations in the digital scholarly publishing:

Érudit, the digital publishing platform distributing mainly French language SSH research results in Canada, and a provider of digital publishing services;

Public Knowledge Project, an organization offering an open source software suite for digital publishing used by over 10,000 scholarly journals worldwide.

The University of Toronto, the University of Calgary and the University of New Brunswick also offered technological expertise in the realization of Synergies.

Synergies impact

Synergies answered two crucial needs for the Canada research dissemination:

Develop and offer digital publishing services prepared to international standards with the lowest production and editing costs possible, especially around the PKP software suites and Érudit digital editing and dissemination services.

Develop expertise and encompass the different types of Canadian scientific publications in a single point of access: journals, theses, conference proceedings, books.

Synergies integrated the work done within its five-party consortium to create a decentralized national platform for SSH research communication.

Synergies has provided an infrastructure for a rich Canadian scholarly record in SSH, the backbone of which is existing and yet to be created peer-review journals.

Synergies thus intended to bring Canadian SSH research into the mainstream of worldwide research discourse by using a cost-effective public/not-for-profit partnership to maximize knowledge dissemination.

The grant came to an end in 2012, but the technological advances gained by each of the five core partners of the project (as well as the twenty-one other Canadian universities also involved) will have a lasting impact on the scholarly publishing landscape in Canada.